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Great Wine Quotes...

A thread on another category inspired me to look this one up and write it out, because it's from Ben Franklin. Who was pretty smart, and woulda been a Snoother had he lived to these days of the internet. Well before Mr. T. Jefferson went to Paris, Franklin already had a great collection of wine, over a thousand bottles (the biggest percentage of it being that of the White Mousseux ("bubbly") variety, then Bordeaux.

This quote is a response to his French friend Abbe Morellet's accusation that Franklin (and Jefferson alike) had instigated the American Revolution mainly to replace English tea with French wine. I mean, why not, ya know? Somethin' to do. Anyway, here's Franklin's response, which is brilliant:

"You have frequently cheered me, my very dear friend, with your excellent drinking songs. In return I am going to edify you with a few Christian, moral and philosophical reflections on the same subject.

"'In vino veritas', says the Sage. The truth is in wine. Before Noah, therefore, men having only water to drink, became abominably wicked, and were justly exterminated by the water it pleased them to drink. It is customary to speak of the conversion of water into wine at the Marriage of Cana as a miracle, but by the goodness of God this conversion takes place every day before our eyes. Water falls from the skies onto our vineyards. There it penetrates the grapes of the vine and is changed into wine, a continual proof that God loves us and that he likes to see us happy. The particular miracles at Cana was done merely to perform this operation in a sudden case of need.

"My good brother, be as kindly and well disposed as He, and do not spoil the good work He has done, wine for our rejoicing. When you see your neighbor at table pour wine into his glass, do not hasten to pour water after it. Why should you wish to drown the truth?"

I've been waiting in vain for some of that quintessentially metaphorical commentary on wine from the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyám. To fill that void, let's settle on verse 75:

And when thyself with shining foot shall pass

Among the guests star-scatter'd on The Grass,

And in thy joyous errand reach the spot

Where I made one - turn down an empty glass!

(for those who have not read this poem in its entirety, wine is a metaphor for life and how it should be lived inter alia)

Something from Keats on Claret. Wonder how he and his tastes would've evolved with more age, if he hadn't died of TB at age 28....

I never drink now above three glasses of wine—and never any spirits and water. Though by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee house—and ordered a Bottle of Claret—now I like Claret, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it,—’t is the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good speck [speculation] to send you some vine roots—could it be done? I’ll enquire—If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ’t is so fine—it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness—then goes down cool and feverless—then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver—no, it is rather a Peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat [wainscot], but rather walks like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a Man to a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes—and gives a Woman the soul and immortality of Ariadne, for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret—and even of that he could never persuade her to take above two cups. I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have—I forgot game—I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant and a Woodcock passim. Talking of game (I wish I could make it), the Lady whom I met at Hastings and of whom I said something in my last I think has lately made me many presents of game, and enabled me to make as many. She made me take home a Pheasant the other day, which I gave to Mrs. Dilke; on which to-morrow Rice, Reynolds and the Wentworthians will dine next door.

—John Keats, from Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819

"Wine produces memory. If I drink a Brouilly in Montana, the wine inevitably reproduces my sitting at Le Select on Montparnasse in Paris dozens of times drinking the same wine trying to recover from a day of interviews on a Paris book tour. When I drink a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol in our casita near the Mexican border, I invariably revisit my many meals cooked by Lulu Peyraud in Bandol in southern France. My memory helps me eat them again. If I drink a Bouzeron on a warm summer evening, I’m able to revisit some of the best trout fishing of my life on a lovely river when we would finish our floating on the last mile of river or so by opening a bottle of Bouzeron. We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can’t drink a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine."

Made me think of going upriver trout fishing (with some artist and wine purveyor friends in Tokyo back in the '80s before I got too busy with business) for Iwana and Yamame (extendible poles, no reels, live bait selected from under river rocks, climbing waterfalls to get to the best spots along the river) north of Tokyo in Honshu, Japan. We'd take along bottles of Macconais chardonnay, and Ducru-Beaucaillou claret, to finish the meal of fresh-caught trout and shiitake mushrooms harvested from the forest, grilled on sticks over a fire, the Burgundy chilled in the river....

More from Keats. Sounds like he was a bit of a rowdy one in his early years (though they all were early since he died so young). Think I was hanging out with several of his descendants early this past decade...

I was drawn to what made my heart sing in what my father called “this vale of woe.” This meant wine and poetry.

Wine crawls in the window of your life and never leaves. A young poet is at a loss because his calling has set him outside of so many comforting boundaries the culture offers and wine easily offers itself as a liquid fuel, making him think he might belong in this hostile country. Even Vergil’s father chided him about becoming a poet, saying, “Homer died broke.”

Another heavy-partying poet, this time Ikkyu from 15th century Japan. He was a zen master, started one of the most famous schools of tea ceremony, was an advisor to the military leaders at the time (and ended up getting his head chopped off for his efforts). Sounds like he also liked his Sake and members of the opposite sex:

The gods slipped us this gift in prehistory, noting our hardships, our cold and hunger and our battles with wild beasts. “O no, another glacier is headed our way, let’s drink some wine,” one imagines them saying. Way back then in southern France in the locale of many great present vineyards there were one-ton bears running around at top speed on their hind legs, an unattractive fact.